Thursday, March 26, 2015

mouth music (space whisperer)

Produced by Allen and featuring a number of Smyth’s former Gong bandmates as well as a number of Allen’s new Spanish compatriots, 1978’s Mother was Smyth’s first solo album, and her first major post-Gong project. It’s a heady, uncompromising manifesto on the simultaneous powers and struggles of matriarchy, with Smyth cooing, murmuring, and storytelling throughout as a siren of psychedelia. She contrasts charming psych-pop throwbacks to Gong’s Radio Gnome sound with a number of disorienting tape collage pieces over which her space whispers vibrate and shimmer, while unflinching spoken monologues make clear that there’s a darker undercurrent to the peace-and-love hippy operandi.

Amidst the quiet atmospheres in which its songs are cloaked, Mother stands as one of the first and most uncompromising feminist dispatches from the progressive rock universe (a realm overpopulated by regressive and rather misogynistic views toward women) and while some of the content is very much of its era, the album’s explorations of gender roles, cosmic consciousness, and domesticity remain vital and rewarding.